PhD defence Laura Korte

Publication date: Tuesday 16 October 2018

Category: DUST

From this day on, Laura Korte may call herself a PhD; she successfully defended her thesis “Saharan dust deposition in the equatorial North Atlantic Ocean and its impact on particle export fluxes” at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. A committee of six experts in the field of marine biology, marine environmental sciences and (paleo-)oceanography discussed the main results that Laura described in her PhD thesis and unanimously judged her worthy of the title.

Here you see Laura defending her thesis. She is flanked by her paranymphs Michelle (who will defend her own thesis on 7 December this year) and Catarina (who works as a post-doc on the response of phytoplankton to dust fertilisation in an affiliated project).

The day before the thesis defence, a mini-symposium was organised at VU in which Laura already presented her work and discussed with the committee members. Most of the opponents also presented their work related to the fertilisation potential of mineral dust.

You can read the pride and happiness on the faces of not only the fresly pronounced PhD but also on the faces of the paranymps, the thesis-committee members as well as the (co)promotors. Well done Frau Doctor!

Why are we so interested in dust?

It turns out that there are many direct and indirect links between dust and climate. The most straightforward one is fine-grained dust in the upper atmosphere blocking incoming sunlight, causing a net cooling effect. But there are warming effects too; in the lower atmosphere, coarser-grained dust particles absorb energy that was refelected at the earth's surface and this way, dust acts as a greenhouse gas.

There are many more negative and positive climate-related effects but the main link to the ocean is the fact that marine life may profit from nutrients in dust. When plankton reproduces, it takes up CO2 from the atmosphere. Thus, dust could potentially act as an ocean fertilizer, sequestering a greenhouse gas!